Lively is a new approach to web programming available as open source under the MIT license. Originally developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, it provides a complete platform for web applications, including dynamic graphics, network access, and development tools. Students, academics, and adventurous developers are encouraged to join the communitiy.
We call it Lively for the following reasons:
It comes live off a web page. There is no installation. The entire system is written in JavaScript, and it becomes active as soon as the page is loaded by a browser. It is, in fact, a web page.
It can change itself and create new content. The Lively Kernel includes a basic graphics editor that allows it to alter and create new graphical content, and also an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows it to alter and create new applications. It comes with a library of graphical and computational components, and these, as well as the kernel, can be altered and extended on the fly.
It can save new artifacts, even clone itself, onto new web pages. The kernel includes WebDAV support for browsing and extending remote file systems, and thus has the ability to save its objects and "worlds" (applications) as new active web pages.
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